Overview

The results of our Collaboration services and software can be used to create three distinct types of online communities.

Social Networks

Social Networks are broad based and are bound by looser "commonality" between members. Networking is almost the sole purpose for joining. Once networked, you can find common areas of interest.

Professional Networks

Professional Networks are communities of "birds of a feather". These allow members to register, connect with each other, create groups and effectively share information, partner on ideas and promote themselves and their activities.

Enterprise Collaboration

Enterprise Collaboration is the most structured type of Network. They manifest themselves as Internal (Employee) and External (mostly Customer) Collaboration Networks.

Internal or Employee collaboration allows companies to more effectively share information, manage distributed workforce initiatives, reduce duplication of work, speed up innovation and reduce costs.

Customer communities allow companies to empower their customers to participate in new product design, launch and growth. Customer communities also enhance customer loyalty and reduce failed product concepts getting to market.

Social Networks

Social Networks can be built around a variety of attributes which draw people to share and learn with each other, have an element of regular participation and have some existing parallels in daily life.

These attributes could be demographic (say a network for Italians in America, College Alumni), interest oriented (Pregnant Mothers, Unemployed Workers, …), commercials (Social Networks around products/brands or retail stores) or could be simply social like facebook, myspace, etc.

They key to social networks is their ability to monetize the network. Collabor not only provides the software and the technology services to setup networks – but also provides the strategy to monetize these networks.

Professional Networks

Professional Networks tend to me more well defined. These are usually built around existing “membership” based organizations – industry associations, “birds of a feather” groups, events and conferences, entrepreneurship networks, political or lobbying, research and education networks, ……

The membership of these networks could be paid or unpaid – but they are there because they get specific value from their membership.

Enterprise Collaboration

Enterprise Collaboration Networks are essentially either Internal Networks/Communities or External Communities. There may be more types and we will also discuss these

Internal

Internal communities are employee communities. These communities could be grouped around attributes like skill, function, interest, domain, location, etc.,

Typically, Internal Communities in an enterprise engage to achieve:

• Project Collaboration
• To spread a unified corporate vision.
• Educate themselves on company policy and administrative matters
• Share company news and collaborate on social and personal issues
• Share creative ideas in an informal, non-obligatory setting
• Submit, share, retrieve and learn from user generated content across a wide variety of enterprise topics.

Collabor assists in building business use case scenarios for internal communities, selection of business units for pilot implementation, enterprise wise deployment and ongoing portal governance with metrics based reports to measure the success of internal community collaboration.

Remember, that potentially an unlimited number of groups can be created within the Internal Communities/Networks implemented by Collabor’s software. Here are a few pre-defined groups for these industries:

• Banking & Financial Services Industry - e.g: Investment Bankers Community
• Retail - e.g: Retail Store Managers Community.
• Telecom & Technology - e.g: Customer Support Community
• Lifesciences - e.g: Clinical Trials Community
• Manufacturing / R&D - e.g: Product Innovation Community
  
  

External

External Communities typically consist of Customers (prospective and current), Vendors, future employees, evangelists, subject matter experts, PR firms, etc.,

External communities allow members to collaborate and engage with specified set of internal groups to achieve desired results. Examples of External communities are:

• Customer support using forums to resolve or support customer issues
• HR function inviting future employees to understand the hiring process and company policies via blog, wiki and audio & video casts.
• Audio / Video casts of new products / services released to customers, PR firms
• Marketing conducts snap poll on a new product / service idea with existing customers

and many more....

Collabor will enable the right mix of security protocols and openness to enable these communities

Examples of External Communities are:

• Innovation communities - Product development groups maintaining blogs and wikis for customers and suppliers.
• Research communities in partnership with universities - research students from a university collaborating with a specified technology group in the enterprise by maintaining a wiki topic on an emerging technology.
• Vendor Collaboration - Vendors working with the process group using forums to reduce the cost of a packing material
• Review Communities – A community for a new product review group to share their ideas and views

The possibilities of creating different sets of collaborative groups within the external communities are endless with Work 2.0. Here are a few examples of what is possible:

• User Conference communities .
• Product Launch/Promotions community
• Campus recruitment communities